Digital Collection

As Poets House continues to build its poetry library—now at 70,000 items—we have also begun to digitize rare print materials, preserving essential, fragile, out-of-print literary work.

Among the first print materials to be digitized are poetry chapbooks, which are smaller in page number, print run, and sometimes physical size than a standard poetry collection and represent an indispensable publication format for poets.

We invite you to explore some of them here in “Chapbooks of the Mimeo Revolution,” which celebrates a period extending from the early 1960s through the mid-1980s, when small presses proliferated and chapbooks contained some of the most innovative poetry of the time.

We will launch a new selection each month. You can digitally flip through the pages of these rare chapbooks, discover commentary that contextualizes each chapbook, and, when available, listen to the voices of the authors reading their poems. Look for the “Listen” button that appears at the bottom of the page when a recording correlating to that page is available. Find full recordings and details of who is reading in the Audio/Video tab.

Poets House's library and digital collections have beengenerously supported by the Leon Levy Foundation. In addition, our thanks goes to Pine Tree Foundation for their targeted support on this digitization project.